Last month Mediathink published a White Paper title RSS: The Next Big Thing On Line. It’s the best starter piece that I’ve seen so far for people – especially in a business context – that are trying to figure out the answer to the question “what is this RSS thing and why do I care.” It’s a short piece (seven pages) – about a third is an intro to RSS, a third talks about aggregator technologies (and gives my favorite – NewsGator – a great review), and the final third talks about implications of RSS on marketing, email, messaging, search engines, and rich media.

Remember – it’s an introductory piece – so if you are an RSS / blogging pro it’s unlikely that you’ll see any new information. But – if you are either trying to figure out RSS or trying to help explain to collegues or customers why they should care about RSS – this belongs in your document toolkit.